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Friday, June 24, 2011

Her father-in-law, Amitabh Bachchan announced the pregnancy on Tuesday via Twitter: "NEWS NEWS NEWS !! I AM GOING TO BECOME A GRANDFATHER .. AISHWARYA EXPECTING .. SO HAPPY AND THRILLED !!!" The news was later confirmed by her manager, according to Reuters.

today's news

This will be the first child for the former Miss World, 37, and her actor-husband Abhishek Bachchan.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Vampires, werewolves and airbenders lead the pack at the Razzies, an Academy Awards spoof that hands out prizes for the year's worst films.

The blockbuster supernatural tale "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" and the action fantasy "The Last Airbender" tied for the most nominations Monday with nine each, including worst picture.

Also nominated for worst picture are Jennifer Aniston's action comedy "The Bounty Hunter," Sarah Jessica Parker's romantic romp "Sex and the City 2" and the "Twilight" parody "Vampires Suck."

"Twilight" star Kristen Stewart had a worst-actress nomination for her role as a teen caught in a love triangle involving her vampire boyfriend (Robert Pattinson) and werewolf pal (Taylor Lautner). Pattinson and Lautner both were nominated for worst actor.

Razzies founder John Wilson said that though "Vampires Suck" was a "Twilight" spoof, "Eclipse" actually was funnier to watch.

"I know people who are into `Twilight' who take it totally seriously and they're very vociferous," Wilson said. "Those of us who are not `Twi-hards', we don't get it. I don't actually know any teenage girls who have had to make the choice between a werewolf and a vampire."

"The Last Airbender" was adapted from the animated TV series about a young hero with the power to reunite feuding nations of people who can control air, water, fire and earth. "Last Airbender" filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan received Razzie nominations for worst director and screenplay.

"All of this gobbledygook language about airbenders and fire benders and water benders," Wilson said. "You feel like you're on a bender watching the movie. It's completely illogical."

The Razzies lineup was announced a day before Oscar nominations come out. Razzie winners, chosen by the group's roughly 600 voters, will be announced Feb. 26, the night before the Oscars.

Three Oscar-winning divas are among nominees for worst supporting actress — Cher for the song-and-dance tale "Burlesque," Liza Minnelli for "Sex and the City 2" and Barbra Streisand for the comedy sequel "Little Fockers."

Jackson Rathbone had a supporting-actor nomination for roles in both "The Last Airbender" and "Eclipse." Dev Patel and Nicola Peltz also had supporting nominations for "Last Airbender."

The entire casts of "Eclipse" and "Last Airbender" were among nominees for worst screen couple or ensemble.

"Last Airbender" also was chosen for worst eye-gouging misuse of 3-D, a special category to mark Hollywood's current craze for shooting in three dimensions or converting 2-D movies to 3-D. The other 3-D nominees are "Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore," "Clash of the Titans," "The Nutcracker in 3-D" and "Saw 3D."

Along with worst-actress contenders Stewart and Aniston, the four "gal pals" in "Sex and the City 2" — Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon — shared a nomination. Also up for worst-actress are Miley Cyrus for the teen drama "The Last Song" and Megan Fox for the action flop "Jonah Hex."

Joining Pattinson and Lautner in the worst-actor category are Jack Black for the fantasy comedy "Gulliver's Travels," Gerard Butler for "The Bounty Hunter" and Ashton Kutcher for the action comedy "Killers" and the romance "Valentine's Day."

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream'

The hits just keep on coming. In advance of the singer's "Teenage Dream" album release, the star unveiled the artwork for her single, "E.T." The track is the next to be aired from Perry's LP. Other wildly successful songs off the album include "California Gurls," "Teenage Dream," and "Firework."California Dream world tour

Katy Perry is going on tour and she likes it. The Grammy nominee appeared on "Facebook Live," the streaming channel of the site, to announce her upcoming "California Dream 2011" world tour. The performer will kick off the North American leg of the tour in Atlanta in June.

Katy Perry with husband Russell Brand

Katy Perry and Russell Brand celebrate Katy's grandmother's 90th birthday in Las Vegas. The fun-loving couple took in Cirque du Soleil's Viva Elvis show with family and friends before hitting the tables to play blackjack at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino.

Katy shows her sparkly side at the concert for the unveiling of the Grammy nominations at Club Nokia in Los Angeles, California. The "Teenage Dream" songstress is up for four awards at this year's fete on February 13, 2011.

Katy Perry at the American Music Awards

Katy Perry performs at the 38th Annual American Music Awards in Los Angeles, California.

In just one year's time, 20-year-old actress Jennifer Lawrence has gone from virtual unknown to one of the most respected young stars in Hollywood. For her Golden Globe-nominated role in "Winter's Bone," she transformed herself into a tough-talking, wood-chopping, squirrel-skinning Ozark teen searching for her missing father. But that's nothing compared to the change she underwent to become Mystique, the blue-skinned shape-shifting mutant in this summer's "X-Men: First Class."

20th Century Fox just released the first photo of the cast of the "X-Men" prequel, and it shows Lawrence and costars as the younger versions of the Marvel Comics superheroes from the original movie trilogy. Lawrence plays Raven Darkholme -- better known as Mystique -- the character played by Rebecca Romijn in the earlier films. And in a conversation with Lawrence, the actress told me that becoming the scaly, blue mutant was an arduous and time-consuming process.

Lawrence said that it took eight hours to apply the full-body makeup to turn her into Mystique. For days when she was wearing her X-Men costume as shown in the photo, it took half as long to cover her face, neck and chest. Then, after a full day of filming, Lawrence said it took another three and a half hours to remove the makeup.

I asked her what she did to pass the time during the eight hours while her makeup was being applied. She said, "We watch movies and talk... It's kind of like a bizarre sleepover." She said over the course of six months of shooting, she became very close with the seven makeup artists and hair stylists who created her look. It was a difficult process for everyone involved, but Lawrence said, "if [someone] were just sitting outside the trailer they'd hear the 'Sex and the City' theme song and giggling and laughing."

Lawrence said that she hadn't seen the first three "X-Men" movies when she first auditioned for the role, and her unfamiliarity with the role of Mystique nearly cost her the part. She told me she auditioned a few times before finally sitting down to watch the original trilogy. Once she did, she said, "I realized I was doing it completely wrong, and I was like, 'Why have they been calling me back?'" Seeing the first three films, she saw that Rebecca Romijn played the role "kind of cold and cool and snakelike... I was doing my Raven kind of sweet and teenybopper, because I didn't know what else to do."

"X-Men: First Class" takes place in the 1960s, when Professor X (played here by James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) were still friends and not yet bitter adversaries. Lawrence described the movie as an origin story more than a prequel, and that Mystique is not the villainess that she is in the previous movies. The photo shows that even the costumes are a bit of a throwback; they retain the yellow and blue color scheme of the X-Men uniforms from the original comic books.

One character who still hasn't been revealed is the film's main bad guy, Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon. Lawrence told me she has filmed a few scenes with Bacon, "and that is my favorite thing about coming to work."

Lawrence has several films coming out this year. Besides "X-Men," she also appears in "The Beaver" opposite Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster. But in the meantime she's still being honored for her work in "Winter's Bone." This past weekend, she attended both the Critics Choice and the Golden Globe Awards, and experts are predicting she's a lock for an Oscar nomination. While it might seem odd to go from an acclaimed independent movie to a blockbuster based on a comic book, it's really not. Two of this year's Golden Globe nominees for Best Actress in drama and comedy will both soon be seen in Marvel Comics movies: Natalie Portman in "Thor," and Emma Stone in the new "Spider-Man." And another former X-Woman, Halle Berry, was nominated as well.

Lawrence told me that between her movie work and the multiple award shows she has had to attend, her schedule is packed to the gills. She said, "I don't think I've ever been this busy in my life, but it's nothing you can complain about. I'm really grateful for everything, but at the same time it's exhausting."

Thursday, January 13, 2011

After about three years of legal wrangling -- thanks mostly to a bankrupt studio and a Broccoli family who owns the rights to James Bond and nothing else on earth, apparently -- James Bond will return to the big screen in November 2012. The reasons for the delay have to do with a lot of boring corporate restructuring business, but what really matters is that Daniel Craig will play Bond again. He is the lone reason anyone still cares about the Bond franchise which appeared dead at the beginning of the decade.

The exact date for the film's release will be November 9, 2012, and it's impressive that they have a release date considering they don't have a cast outside of Craig. Sam Mendes, whose directorial star has dimmed since he was initially signed on for this project, will direct, and the script is apparently in place and has in fact been ready for about two years. We hope they update it: We wouldn't want it to include lines like "Yes, Bond, you'll survive my trap only when a black man is elected President. You're doomed!"

The delay between films -- it will have been four years since "Quantum Of Solace" came out -- is the longest since ... well, since Craig took over for Pierce Brosnan in 2006. At that point, the whole franchise was a joke and thought doomed in an irony-drenched age. (There were people who claimed Mike Myers had killed James Bond. Mike Myers!) Then Craig came in and made Bond his own in "Casino Royale" with a raw, muscular, borderline psychotic performance that re-energized the whole franchise. "Quantum Of Solace" was less well-received -- it had the lamest Bond girl since Denise Richards pretended to be a physicist -- but it still had Craig, who is single-handedly keeping the franchise afloat. For now. We'll see what happens in November 2012, which is so long from now that it'll be lucky to beat "The Hobbit" to screens.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

When the final curtain came down for Brittany Murphy on Sunday morning, Dec. 20, 2009, the drama played out in the one room in her Hollywood Hills mansion that had become her refuge: her bathroom. This tiled, peach-colored sanctuary was where she went to get away from the mounting pressures of her life: a house she hated, a city where she no longer wanted to live, a career that was imploding and the constant burden of being a caregiver.

Even though she didn’t feel well herself, Brittany was there to care for her mother, Sharon Murphy, a breast cancer survivor suffering debilitating neuropathy, and her ailing husband of three years, 39-year-old Simon Monjack. For nearly a year, the England native had been having seizures and a month earlier suffered an apparent heart attack. When he had a seizure, his arms and legs flailing on the big four-poster bed, Brittany would rush to his side. Although weakened by anemia and gasping for breath from her own ailments, Brittany held his 300-pound body down, using a spoon to keep him from swallowing his tongue.

Simon joked that his wife’s bathroom was “her comfort zone.” He called it the “Brittany-sized room,” reflecting her diminutive 5-foot-2 stature, and recalled how she spent hours sampling the cosmetics and perfumes that crowded every inch of counter space, critically studying her body image, sometimes singing to herself or writing bits of poetry in a journal, listening to music or paging through magazines from which she would tear out pages with clothes she just had to have.

While Brittany dozed on the big bed beside him after midnight, Simon and Sharon talked about the practical aspects of their plan to move to New York. They discussed selling the big house Brittany had purchased in 2003 for $3.9 million, fully furnished, from Britney Spears, who had lived there with Justin Timberlake. Brittany always felt the tri-level Mediterranean at the top of Rising Glen Road was unlucky. She wanted to start fresh in 2010 in New York, where they could start a family, Simon would find work as a screenwriter and director and she’d star in independent films that would revive her career. That Saturday night was chilly and windy. The electric power kept going out, and the backup generator failed. They used flashlights when it went dark, afraid to light candles near the wheezing oxygen machine Simon relied on to ease his sleep apnea, bouts of asthma and frequent respiratory infections.

“She absolutely hated the Rising Glen house,” Simon told me in January 2010. “Every time we would drive up Sunset, Brit would say, ‘Please, can we stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel?’ I’d say: ‘Honey, you’ve got to be realistic. We have our house, a 10,000-square-foot home. We’re going to stay in it.’”

As it turned out, it was where Brittany and Simon were to die, in surprisingly similar ways, only five months apart.

I first met Brittany in 1992 in L.A., when she was 14. She had become close friends with my daughter, who was also an actress and singer. Brittany and her mother became part of our extended family in those years, often sharing dinners, holidays and birthdays. At times, Brittany turned to me as a father figure, and we talked about her life and career. She lacked higher education, but behind the giggles, Brittany was a sponge who soaked up knowledge. She educated herself and had interests ranging from politics to science to the intricacies of show business. We spent many happy times sharing thoughts.

I hadn’t seen a lot of Brittany after she married Simon in 2007, but when the news flashed of her unexpected death, I went with my wife and daughter to her house to try and comfort Sharon and Simon. I helped them deal with the media onslaught in those first days and, at their request, gave the eulogy at Brittany’s funeral on Christmas Eve .

In those first weeks after Brittany died, as Simon lay on the bed, rarely rising or bathing, he encouraged me to write an independent book about Brittany that would tell her true story. He and Sharon gave me a series of on-the-record interviews, which are quoted throughout this article. Only later would I realize that much of what Simon told me — about his family, education, marriage and career — was exaggerated or simply fabricated.

Simon wanted the book because he was convinced — before the autopsy report on Brittany came back — that she had literally died of a broken heart caused by the shoddy way she had been treated in Hollywood. He wanted to expose the studios, producers and talent reps he believed had used rumor and innuendo — about her alleged lateness, inability to remember lines, drug use and partying — to destroy her career. “I honestly think Brittany’s life has to serve a purpose,” Simon told me. “Her true fans, and young people coming off the bus, deserve to know the bubble can burst.”

Simon was especially bitter at Warner Bros. because Brittany had been dropped as a voice actor on "Happy Feet 2" after stories about illegal drug use appeared on tabloid websites. He recalled Brittany crying for hours about her stalled career. She hadn’t starred in a studio movie since 2004’s "Little Black Book," and Simon believed there had been a conspiracy against her among former agents and managers. That was a major motivation to move away from Hollywood.

“It wasn’t about the money,” he told me. “She wasn’t going, ‘Oh, I’m not being offered $10 million to do a movie.’ It was: ‘I’m not getting offered anything where I can really show what I can do. I can sing. I can dance. I can do all these things I was put on Earth to show the world,’ and somehow she was being blocked from doing it.”

The irony, Simon insisted, was that Brittany literally could not do drugs. In her early teens, she had been diagnosed with a heart murmur, so Brittany knew illegal drugs could endanger her life. That fear, Sharon said, that made it impossible for Brittany to use cocaine or stimulants.

The tabloid noise had increased over the years as Brittany got thinner and blonder in a quest for leading roles in movies, which also raised the specter of anorexia, which haunts many Hollywood actresses who feel the need to be thin. Brittany was 115 pounds when she died, a healthy weight for her height, even though she looked fragile and her limbs were reed-thin. “She had curves in all the right places,” Simon said. “She was just miniaturized. She ate whatever she wanted when she wanted.”

Still, Brittany had self-image issues. “The thing she was very conscious of was her height,” said Martha Coolidge, who directed Brittany in the 2009 Lifetime movie "Tribute." “She felt she was short, so one reason she controlled her weight was the thinner you are, the taller you look. She was knowledgeable about her body and what would exaggerate her height.”

In the meantime, Brittany had learned to live with physical pain: Ever since a car accident shortly after Clueless came out in 1995, she had coped with a recurring ache in her jaw. Sick or well, she struggled to keep going and keep working. She was the family breadwinner. But after becoming a name-above-the-title star in such movies as "Just Married" and "Little Black Book," things weren’t going well with her once-promising career. In the months leading up to her death, she had seen the end of her lucrative, long-running voice role as Luanne on "King of the Hill" and, in addition to losing roles in "Happy Feet 2" and 2008’s " Tinker Bell ," had been dropped from "The Expendables."

“The nature of this town is exploitive,” Simon told me. “Brittany would be alive today if she was a housewife in Edison, N.J.” — where she grew up — “or a successful person in another business.” But showbiz had been her dream since she was a small child pointing to a TV screen and telling Sharon she wanted to be on television some day.

It was wonderful that Brittany never lost her childlike innocence and sense of wonder, or that infectious giggle. But what worked for her as an actress made for a troubled life: She never learned to drive or balance her own checkbook. She looked to her mother, business managers and finally Simon to care for her. It was the need for a father — her biological father was rarely part of her life — mentor, teacher and anchor that led her to Simon.

Brittany had an unusually close relationship with her mother. Sharon told me they “grew up” together. I was able to witness firsthand their unique bond. They referred to each other as “soulmates.” Ever since Brittany came to Hollywood at 13, with her mother following shortly thereafter, Sharon had dedicated herself to her daughter. In turn, Brittany had put her career on hold twice when Sharon had bouts of breast cancer shortly after the making of "Clueless" and again in 2003, when Brittany camped out in her mom’s hospital room and I was among the many friends she recruited to donate blood on Sharon’s behalf.

Sharon “worked hard being a single mother,” her sister Deborah “Debba” Murphy told me shortly after Brittany died. “I don’t think she forced Britty into the showbiz stuff. Britty wanted to do it.” JoAnne Colonna, Brittany’s agent or manager for a decade, recalled meeting her when she was 16 and being struck by her energy, talent and how close she was to her mother. “They were adorable together,” she said. “They finished each other’s sentences. Both were bright and bubbly, and that relationship never changed.”

Growing up in Edison, Brittany said her first words at six months, according to Aunt Debba, but didn’t walk until she was nearly 15 months. Sharon described her as an outgoing child who loved to dance and sing. She got her showbiz start in school and local theater, starring in the musical "Really Rosie" at age 9. After that performance, Sharon recalled, Brittany told a local TV station: “I’m going to get an agent and do commercials and work in New York. Then I’m going to move to Los Angeles, be in movies in Hollywood and then come back and do Broadway. Then I’ll probably have a huge musical career. I am going to change the world.”

And she did almost all of it. She starred on TV series; in addition to " King of the Hill ," she did guest roles ranging from "Frasier" to "Nash Bridges." She was in more than two dozen movies, from her breakout role in "Clueless" to the romantic comedy " Love and Other Disasters". She even returned to Broadway in the 1997 revival of Arthur Miller ’s "A View From the Bridge." New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Brittany’s Broadway debut “exceptional.” Even when her movies got mixed notices, Brittany often stood out, as in "8 Mile," the 2002 screen debut of rapper Eminem. “It will be a shame if she becomes a star via this embarrassing siren turn,” critic David Edelstein wrote for "Slate." “That said, she has it. When she turned those huge black-rimmed eyes on Rabbit, she made me think of Morris Day’s line to Apollonia in Purple Rain: ‘Your lips would make a lollipop too happy.’ ” Roger Ebert didn’t like "Just Married" but saw in Brittany “a rare and particular quality.” But Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday just didn’t get her, saying that after "8 Mile" she should understand “her true calling is that of a bad girl, with or without a heart of gold.”

But, in fact, Brittany was more than any one thing. She could disappear into a role, as she did in " Girl , Interrupted" and "Don’t Say a Word;" the latter I believe should have earned her an Oscar nomination. Said Penny Marshall, who directed her in "Riding in Cars With Boys:" “Her timing was impeccable. She could be funny. She could be dramatic. She was a terrific actress.”

Time critic Richard Corliss noted shortly after her passing that Brittany was a “gifted actress” who “didn’t win the acclaim she dreamed of and might have deserved.” He was right that her work has been underappreciated, just as there is no doubt a part of her tragedy is that the potential she showed for greatness was snuffed out so early.

The bug that would play a major role in Brittany’s passing — Staphylococcus aureus — was imported from Puerto Rico, where Brittany had gone six weeks before her death to star in "The Caller," a low-budget thriller that was the latest in a series of ever-lower-budget movies she had done during the previous three years, mostly for the payday.

Brittany had arrived in San Juan with Simon, her mother and her Maltese puppy, Clara. Press reports later said she was fired after the first day and that Simon had been drunk on the set, but the movie’s producers, prodded by Simon’s lawyer, called it a mutual parting. Simon told me that Brittany had been unhappy when she realized the thriller she had signed to star in had morphed into a horror flick. “She said, ‘There’s too much Santeria in it,’ ” Simon recalled. “And it was spooky. She told me, ‘I’ve been offered lots of horror movies, and I’ve never done them. And I’m not going to start now.’”

She parted company after one day of shooting when the producers insisted on banning Simon from the set. Still, they stayed eight more days vacationing in San Juan, so, as Simon said, it wouldn’t “be a wasted trip.” But Simon and Sharon caught colds — Staphylococcus — while there. On the flight home to LAX on Nov. 28, 2009, Simon had what he described as a “mild heart attack.” Simon said Brittany administered CPR on the plane, even though Brittany was quoted as calling it an asthma attack. News reports of Simon’s medical problems and Brittany being replaced on "Caller" became the latest in a barrage of negative press about the couple.

He had entered Brittany’s life at a very vulnerable time. She had risen so quickly and fallen so far in such a short time that even fans had to wonder what was happening. Most of her final films headed straight to video. It was a sad chapter in what had been a career filled with promise. “She was incredibly talented,” Chris Snyder, who worked for Brittany’s first Hollywood agent, Iris Burton, told me. “There were very few people who could do what she could do in comedy. She had a Lucille Ball kind of humor. She was a force of nature in comedy, but she could also do drama, which is very rare.”

Said David Latt, who directed Brittany in one of her last productions, the cable TV movie "MegaFault," “I compared her to a really great old-movie star.”

Gary Fleder, who directed "Don’t Say a Word," said: “What people don’t appreciate is that she was fearless. Whatever eccentricity or vanity existed in her life, in her work as an actor there was none. She was willing to go for it, to be raw, to be ugly and to expose herself emotionally.”

A year later, Brittany’s talent and career achievements have been pushed to the background by the tabloid sensationalism that led up to her death and the many questions she left behind. What’s true is that over the years, her use of prescription drugs steadily increased as she coped with pain from the auto accident, took medication for seizures after an incident during the production of "8 Mile" and coped with other health issues. That all added to her problems shortly after the return from Puerto Rico, when she caught Simon and Sharon’s bug. She took the antibiotic Biaxin, migraine pills, cough medicine and an over-the-counter nasal spray. The day she died, she had also taken an anti-depression drug (fluoxetine, aka Prozac), an anti-seizure drug (Klonopin), an anti-inflammatory (methylprednisolone) and a beta blocker that Simon gave her, as well as Vicoprofen to ease pain from her period. But Brittany kept getting sicker, and her laryngitis during her final 10 days was the worst of her life. She was also weakened by her period — the second in a month — which was causing anemia that cut her red-blood count to a quarter of normal.

On her final night, Brittany was gasping for breath, her lips turning blue from a lack of oxygen as her lungs filled with fluid. Despite her problems, Brittany had not seen a doctor for six weeks, though she consulted by phone a few times and had talked to a pharmacist. Late Friday afternoon of her final weekend, she made a doctor appointment for Monday. She never got there.

Being sick had become something Brittany just accepted. There was no sense of urgency to see a doctor because she and Simon practiced their own form of “holistic” medicine — meaning they picked and chose among medicines and doctors. They were always afraid the paparazzi would find out if they were seen as sick and that it would hurt their job prospects in Hollywood. That was one reason Brittany didn’t go to an emergency room that night, and it was an excuse for Simon not to call for help when he had seizures or another of his heart problems. It was also why Brittany used false names to hide her identity at the pharmacy.

One druggist, Eddie Bubar of Eddie’s Drugs in West Los Angeles, became alarmed by the frequency and amounts of their drug purchases and suspected they were “doctor shopping” — getting drugs from multiple sources. He confronted Simon in August 2009 and told them to take their business elsewhere. Bubar said he feared they were being overmedicated, though he never imagined it would have such dire consequences. Simon and Sharon, he said, got drugs under their own names. But Brittany preferred an alias: Lola Manilow, which Bubar was aware of.

The paranoia Brittany had about the public and industry learning of her medical problems played into Simon’s conspiracy theories about people being out to get her. He stoked that paranoia and used it to gain control over Brittany in a surprisingly short time.

Brittany didn’t date until she was 21, then had several long relationships: She had one with Ashton Kutcher for six months after they met on "Just Married" in 2002, was engaged to Hollywood talent manager Jeff Kwatinetz for four months in 2004 and was engaged to a production assistant she met on "Little Black Book" in 2005.

Then came her whirlwind romance with Simon, ignited when she phoned him from Tokyo in early 2007 while making The Ramen Girl to say how much she liked his script for The White Hotel, based on the D.M. Thomas novel. They agreed to meet when she returned to L.A. for what turned out to be a dinner at Hotel Bel-Air that went into the wee hours. The following week, he followed her to New York, where she was doing publicity for a movie. From then on, Simon never slept a night away from her, except for nine days he was incarcerated by U.S. Immigration Services for an expired visa. Shortly after that incarceration, on May 5, 2007, they were married by a rabbi at Brittany’s home on Rising Glen Road. Nearly all of the handful of guests were Brittany’s employees or vendors. Simon’s best man was her chauffeur.

Brittany saw the stocky Englishman with the sexy accent and deep voice as he portrayed himself: a wealthy, educated, cultured filmmaker. He had been born in the affluent London suburb of Hillingdon and grew up in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. His father, William, had worked in the City, London’s financial district, until he got a brain tumor at 29. He died six years later when Simon was 15, an event his mother, Linda Monjack, says left her son devastated. After that, she says, her son began to exaggerate and at times seemed unable to separate fact from fiction. “His intelligence was off the scale, but he was also a child in many ways,” his mother told me. “His father’s death completely destroyed him.”

Simon went to film school at NYU and found some success as a photographer and music video director but faltered in his debut as a filmmaker, Two Days, Nine Lives, financed by his family. A BBC reviewer described it as “a continuous volley of dead conversations.” It was never released, and his family lost the investment, which he promised his mother he would repay but never did.

While there was some inherited family money, his mother says Simon ran through it long before he met Brittany. He still told her he was heir to a fortune and was able to impress her with his knowledge of art and knack for languages and music. His mother says he had a photographic memory. He also had no problem spinning tales to get his way with women on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving a trail of broken hearts, unpaid bills and angry fiancees. A woman he met in London in 1999 later described Simon as “very manipulative” and said he lied to her about his wealth and properties. He “usually cons good, honest, trustworthy people,” she wrote in a letter to the FBI, meant as a warning to others — which I accessed through the Freedom of Information Act — “simply because they cannot comprehend that a person can be so deceptive to that extent; it’s almost unbelievable. I believe he is sick and lies continuously, defrauding people, hurting people including his own family. He himself has admitted this to me.”

Richard Golub, a New York attorney and best-selling author who got involved with Simon writing a script for what became Factory Girl, says he wasn’t very good as a screenwriter but could spin self-aggrandizing stories. Finally fed up, Golub investigated Simon and confronted him. “I said, ‘I really don’t want to be in business with someone who is flim-flamming people,’ ” Golub told me. “ ‘You’ve left a trail of people behind that are going to sue you because you took their trust funds or inheritance or conned them into investing in projects you never delivered.’ ” Later that night, Simon called Golub. “He said, ‘Look, you really have my number,’ ” Golub said. “ ‘I’ve led this really [expletive]-up life, and I really have conned and cheated a lot of people. But I’m turning over a new leaf.’ ”

Several times, Brittany was confronted with evidence of Simon’s checkered past but refused to believe it or chose to ignore it. She was in love and fiercely loyal. After the late George Hickenlooper, director of Factory Girl, went public with criticism of Simon for claiming he produced that film (he really got his credit in a legal settlement), there was a late-night call from Brittany, with whom he had been friends. Hickenlooper said in an interview days before his death in October that Brittany pleaded with him to remove a scathing overview of Simon’s “frivolous lawsuit” he had posted on IMDb. “ ‘If you ruin my husband, you are going to ruin me,’ ” Hickenlooper recalled Brittany saying. “I just said, ‘Look, you’ve got to clear your head on this, honey.’ I just knew she was so fragile that anyone who lovingly gave her the time of day and could put up with her eccentricities she would be attached to immediately.”

Despite the evidence, Brittany believed Simon would provide financial security, help revive her career and allow her to fulfill her dream of being a mother. In their first year, they did find a creative flowering together. He shot hundreds of photos of Brittany and would play piano at night while she lay beneath the baby grand listening.

Brittany had been completely taken with Simon. What she didn’t know when they met was that Simon was nearly broke and in a legal battle with a producer on White Hotel, Susan Stewart Potter, who hired him to direct, then discovered he was trying to cut her out. He eventually paid Stewart a legal settlement of more than $300,000. When Simon moved into Brittany’s house, he didn’t mention he was leaving his last fiancee with thousands in unpaid rent on an L.A. apartment or that he had written numerous bad checks. Shortly after they married, Brittany paid $10,000 to a casting director who had sued Simon over a bounced check.

I first met Simon shortly after their marriage, when Brittany brought him to our house in Encino for Father’s Day 2007. Simon led the conversation, played piano and went outside to smoke a cigar, which Brittany hurried to light. Simon told us they had to take extreme security precautions because they were under surveillance by helicopters and their phone was bugged. He said he had hired a private eye who gave Simon names of family and friends who cheated, stole from them or sold information to the tabloids.

It turned out to be one of the few times we saw them in the next two years. Simon, as many of Brittany’s family members and friends came to believe, had created a web of paranoia around Brittany and used it to separate her from anyone who might have challenged his dominance. Simon even told terrible tales about his mother, apparently to keep her from telling Brittany and Sharon the truth about him. Linda Monjack says she met her daughter-in-law only once, at dinner in New York in 2007. But Simon communicated with his mother by phone and e-mail nearly every day.

Simon’s health, meanwhile, took a sudden turn for the worse in the second year of their marriage after he fell off a ladder during a photo shoot in Los Angeles. That apparently started his seizures, which he also told me were tied to brain tumors. His mother told me his use of prescription medications after the marriage was a surprise to her because before that, he had been adamant about not using drugs. She also believes her son developed Munchausen’s syndrome, where a person fakes illness to get attention. She was skeptical about the cause of his seizures and believes her son could somehow make it appear that his heart stopped. Simon, though, claimed he had various heart problems and needed open-heart surgery. But his autopsy showed a healthy, slightly enlarged heart, and his doctor in Burbank told authorities that Simon had taken an EKG exam shortly before his death and that his heart was fine.

At about 3 a.m. on Brittany’s final morning, power returned to the Hollywood Hills after a 45-minute blackout. Brittany woke and made her way to the little balcony off the cluttered bedroom. At his wife’s request, Simon phoned upstairs to Sharon and said Brittany needed her. Sharon came down carrying Clara, named after Brittany’s favorite old-time star, Clara Bow, another one-time Hollywood “It” girl. What Sharon saw frightened her. “She was lying on the patio trying to catch her breath,” Sharon recalled. “I said ‘Baby, get up.’ She said: ‘Mommy, I can’t catch my breath. Help me. Help me.’ ”

Sharon and Simon were sympathetic, but Brittany frequently complained about ailments, so they didn’t take it seriously. “She was always so dramatic,” Sharon said. “I’ve replayed that so many times. She asked if she could use the oxygen, but Simon said her heart could stop with oxygen, and anyway he then had another seizure, a long, horrific seizure.” Sharon then made her daughter hot tea with ginger and lemon. “Her lips were parched, like she was dehydrated,” Sharon said. “So I made her drink that.”

Brittany returned to her peach bathroom around 7:30 a.m., followed minutes later by Sharon. “She said, ‘Mommy, I really don’t feel well,’ ” Sharon told me. As Brittany collapsed around 8 a.m., Sharon pulled her daughter to her and screamed for Simon, who said to call 911 while he moved Brittany into a cold shower. Sharon, on instructions from the 911 operator, talked Simon through resuscitation efforts until the paramedics arrived. In a statement, Sharon tells Entertainment Tonight : "As I am dealing daily with the heart-wrenching loss of my entire family, I am shocked by Mr. Block's statements. This is very disturbing that someone that was supposed to be mine and Brittany's friend, and someone who works for The Hollywood Reporter, would make statements that are 100-percent untrue. For anyone to even fathom that I would just sit and watch my only beloved daughter die and not get help instantly is beyond my way of thinking and despicable."

Brittany was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, with Sharon and Simon following by car. Simon remembered being directed to a children’s waiting room with little green chairs. Around 10 a.m., a physician said they couldn’t save her. “I said, ‘What about medical science?’ ” Simon recalled. “ ‘Isn’t there anything that can keep her alive? Do anything!’ But then they told us she hadn’t made it.”

Simon at first refused an autopsy because he didn’t want her beautiful body violated, he said, and felt it went against his orthodox Jewish tradition. But the L.A. coroner insisted, eventually finding that she died of pneumonia, anemia and a toxic cocktail of prescription drugs: a perfect storm of ailments and overmedication. “She had been sick at least two weeks,” assistant L.A. Coroner Ed Winter said. “Had they taken her to a doctor or hospital, it would have been treatable.”

On May 23, five months after his wife, Simon died in the same bedroom at age 40, curiously from similar causes: acute pneumonia and severe anemia. He too had been taking a lot of prescription drugs, but the coroner ruled that out as a direct cause of death. Even so, Simon’s drug use and doctor shopping, along with that of Corey Haim and others, is under investigation by a multi-agency task force led by the California Attorney General’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. It is looking into celebrity abuse of prescription meds, doctor shopping and the use of aliases.

It is impossible to know if Brittany might still be alive had Simon not come along. However, it seems obvious that he brought out her worst traits and contributed to an atmosphere that was ultimately deadly to her. Rex Beaber, a L.A. clinical psychologist and attorney, didn’t know Simon but says after hearing his story that his behavior was consistent with a sociopathic personality disorder. He called what happened to Brittany “an age-old story you see commonly with people who meet narcissistic personalities and people who are sociopathic. They have a kind of blood instinct for the weakness of people around them.”

In his way, Simon did love her, but that was part of his sickness. He was mentally ill and couldn’t help preying on her at a time when she was highly susceptible to his oily charm, false promises and outright lies.

Still, even knowing the truth about Simon, I can understand from my own hours talking with him how seductive he could be. He would look you in the eye and tell his tall tales with such sincerity, and he always had an excuse for anything bad said about him. And for his myriad faults, Simon was transformed in his final days with Brittany.

“I don’t think I can be damaged any more than I have been,” Simon told me. “When ‘freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,’ as my wife would quote Janis Joplin, I’ve lost the only thing that really mattered to me. I lived and breathed my wife. She was the light of my life.”

Ian McKellen has signed on to return as wizard Gandalf in "The Hobbit," the two-pic adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel being directed by Peter Jackson.

The dealmaking on Hobbit for a slew of Jackson veterans from his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy has been coming fast and furious and comes on the heels of Andy Serkis finally inking his deal to reprise Gollum.

"The Hobbit" book introduced Gandalf and Gollum, with both characters going on to become part of literature's most popular characters. Gandalf sets the adventure going in the story and appears throughout the novel. Gollum appears in a chapter that has gone on to be one of the most memorable in all of fantasy literature.

Elijah Wood signed his deal to return as Frodo last week, and Cate Blanchett will play Galadriel once again. Orlando Bloom has an offer to return as elf archer Legolas, though it's too early to tell if a deal will be made.

McKellen, who was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Gandalf, has spent recent years doing mostly voice work for film and TV, although he did star in the remake of AMC's "The Prisoner." His last major film role was in 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."